Also turning in a strong performance was Lotus reserve Charles Pic, who went second-fastest with a time of 1 minute, 26.661 seconds. The Frenchman is backing up Romain Grosjean and Pastor Maldonado this year after racing with Caterham in 2013.

Lewis Hamilton, who won his fourth Grand Prix in a row last weekend at Barcelona and took over the World Championship lead as a result, was third-fastest in his Mercedes at 1 minute, 26.674 seconds.

Kimi Raikkonen was fourth-fastest but he and Ferrari had a tough afternoon. Shortly after he had begun his work for the day, he was forced to stop his car on course as smoke billowed from it.

He would come back in the afternoon, but a later spin into the gravel forced Ferrari to end his day early.

Jean-Eric Vergne overcame two stoppages early on to round out the Top 5 for Scuderia Toro Rosso. His team and Sauber were charged with tire development this afternoon for Pirelli. Tomorrow, those duties will shift to McLaren and Force India.

Multiple red flags marked the day’s events. In addition to Raikkonen and Vergne’s issues, Red Bull reserve Sebastien Buemi brought one out when he stopped with gearbox problems. Ditto for Kamui Kobayashi of Caterham, who crashed at Turn 3 late.

Since it’s highly unlikely that Marussia is all of a sudden faster than Mercedes and the rest of the field I’d suggest they were running light on weight. Another troubling day for Ferrari makes ya wonder if they are just having a bad run of luck or if the wheels have fallen off… Oh wait that would be Red B.S. Racing that forgets to tighten the wheel nuts on any of Seb’s teammate’s cars, not Ferrari. /sarcasm

I guess the car doesn’t have to be legal for testing. If that’s how Marussia chooses to spend one of their few opportunities to do actual on-track testing, I suppose they have every right to. Maybe they’re looking to impress a potential sponsor.

Yeah if not running light, maybe they were running more than the max fuel flow for a race. I’m not sure though if eclipsing your dry qualifying time by 3 seconds in wet testing reflects well on your qualifying efforts though.

Max was on the supersofts, when everyone else was on the mediums. That alone is over a second right there. Take a bit of wing off, and send him out on fumes, and its possible. Very unlikely, but possible, it is legit.

Either way F1Rejects forums are going to break when they see this…..

techmeister1 - May 13, 2014 at 8:02 PM

I got word that the Marussia mechanics connected the two sparkplug cables that they thought were spares…to the engine sparkplugs so they are now running on six cylinders. LOL